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Factfulness
Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used
and
remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other
possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the
future.
To control the blame instinct,
resist finding a scapegoat.
•
Look for causes, not villains.
When something goes wrong don’t look
for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can
happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy
on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that
created the situation.
•
Look for systems, not heroes.
When someone claims to have caused
something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened
anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system
some credit.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER TEN
THE URGENCY INSTINCT
How “now or never” can block our roads and our minds
Roadblocks and Mental Blocks
“If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?”
asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk.
Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its
population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just
one doctor—me.
Earlier that day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the
north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose
hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely
paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them
blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100 percent sure it was not
contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, poring over
my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was
seeing had not been described before. I’d guessed this was some kind of
poison rather than anything infectious, but I couldn’t be sure, and I had asked
my wife to take our young children and leave the district.
Before I could figure out what to say, the mayor said, “If you think it could
be contagious, I must do something. To avoid a catastrophe, I must stop the
disease from reaching the city.”
The worst-case scenario had already unfolded in the mayor’s mind, and
immediately spread to mine.
The mayor was a man of action. He stood up and said, “Should I tell the
military to set up a roadblock and stop the buses from the north?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea. You have to do something.”
The mayor disappeared to make some calls.
When the sun rose over Memba the next morning, some 20 women and
their youngest children were already up, waiting for the morning bus to take
them to the market in Nacala to sell their goods. When they learned the bus
had been canceled, they walked down to the beach and asked the fishermen to
take them by the sea route instead. The fishermen made room for everyone in
their small boats, probably happy to be making the easiest money of their
lives as they sailed south along the coast.
Nobody could swim and when the boats capsized in the waves, all the
mothers and children and fishermen drowned.
That afternoon I headed north again, past the roadblock, to continue to
investigate the strange disease. As I drove through Memba I came across a
group of people lining up on the roadside dead bodies they had pulled put of
the sea. I ran down to the beach but it was too late. I asked a man carrying the
body of a young boy, “Why were all these children and mothers out in those
fragile boats?”
“There was no bus this morning,” he said. Several minutes later I could still
barely understand what I had done. Still today I can’t forgive myself. Why did
I have to say to the mayor, “You must do something”?
I couldn’t blame these tragic deaths on the fishermen. Desperate people
who need to get to market of course take the boat when the city authorities for
some reason block their road.
I have no way to tell you how I carried on with the work I had to do that
day and in the days afterward. And I didn’t talk about this to anyone else for
35 years.
But I did carry on with my work and eventually I discovered the cause of
the paralytic disease: as I suspected, the people had been poisoned. The
surprise was that they had not eaten anything new. The cassava that formed
the basis for the local diet had to be processed for three days to make it edible.
Everyone had always known that, so no one had ever even heard of anyone
who had been poisoned or seen these symptoms. But this year, there had been
a terrible harvest across the whole country and the government had been
buying processed cassava at the highest price ever. The poor farmers were
suddenly able to make that extra money they needed to escape poverty and
were selling everything they had. After a successful day of selling, though,
they were coming home hungry. So hungry that they couldn’t resist eating the
unprocessed cassava roots straight from the fields. At 8 p.m. on August 21,
1981, this discovery transformed me from being a district doctor to being a
researcher, and I spent the next ten years of my life investigating the interplay
among economies, societies, toxins, and food.
Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR
Congo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got
scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock.
Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the
capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always
supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-
stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from its
second-largest food-producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A
mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed.
Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the
rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared
and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock!
At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality.
They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their
main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people
abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola
outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on people honestly
disclosing everybody they have touched. These heroes were sitting in poor
slum dwellings carefully interviewing people who had just lost a family
member about every individual their loved one might have infected before
dying. Often, of course, the person being interviewed was on that list and
potentially infected. Despite the constant fear and wave after wave of rumors,
there was no room for drastic, panicky action. The infection path could not be
traced with brute force, just patient, calm, meticulous work. One single
individual delicately leaving out information about his dead brother’s multiple
lovers could cost a thousand lives.
When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case
scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think
analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take
immediate action.
Back in Nacala in 1981, I spent several days carefully investigating the
disease but less than a minute thinking about the consequences of closing the
road. Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic
shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I
did something terrible.
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